Paul was a clerk from Wheeling, West Virginia, working in Baltimore with Ian and me, on a crew of about ten. These two older guys were telling stories about women back and forth, trying to shock each other. Ian was a black former Marine, who claimed to have been a member of a recon platoon. He made numerous claims that he and “the platoon” had done various things of the stupid kind. Two special ops soldiers have assured me that the majority of Marine Recon soldiers are above and beyond Ian’s adventures. So, I suspect, that when Ian made a claim that he and “the whole platoon” went out to dip their wick in an unsavory skank well that he was referring to himself and the handful of other black recon soldiers in the unit in the late 1970s. In any case, Ian’s adventures included:

1. Having unprotected sex with a Filipino whore after sneaking off base, and contracting VD.

2. Pulling a train on a hooker at her house near Paris Island, with him and his friends all contracting VD, getting needles shot in their ass, and then going back and getting VD from her again and getting needled again, because he, said, “the pussy was that good!”

3. Having sex with hookers in Okinawa at a place called “Shit River.”

4. While stationed in Turkey at an American Airbase [Incrilik, I think] near the Syrian-Iranian border, Ian and his buddies had two days leave and wanted to get laid. Unfortunately the nearest hooker was a day’s drive inland. They rented a vehicle and drove out there, only to discover the hooker was ancient, 80 or more years old! Well, what is a soldier if he is afraid to soldier on in the face of grim Fate? They had sex with her and felt they had gotten their money’s worth.

5. Ian once picked up a cute looking girl on North Avenue, and decided to finger fuck her while he drove East toward Belair Road. When his hand slipped up her dress, he discovered that not only did she not have a vagina, but that her dick was bigger than his [which he indicated was more offensive than the fact that she had no vagina]. He let her off on the side of the road.

6. Once Ian got in an argument with his sister, which got physical. After he prevailed in the scuffle, he went to bed in his underwear, only to wake up to police batons raining down on his head as he was dragged out into the street while his sister talked trash to him about “…being a homeless niցցer!”

With a “Beat that, white-boy” look on his face, Ian rested on his well-deserved laurels, confident that his life of bitches had been harder than Paul’s. While Ian looked like Joe Frazier, Paul was a tall, lean, working machine, the best clerk I ever worked with. He was clean cut and wore button shirts and had a face like the actor that played the liquid terminator in T2: Judgment Day.

It turns out that Paul did once find himself necking at a night club in Atlantic City with a transvestite, and had to be restrained from throwing it out the window. He also spoke of a Gypsy woman in Wheeling, claiming that he and his teenage friends used to gather by the bushes on the side of her husband’s house, and after her husband fell to sleep she would come out to the driveway and service them for a few dollars apiece.

In between jobs, Paul was staying back in Wheeling with his parents, who were both at work one hot, Ohio Valley, summer afternoon, when the young blonde from next door—who had been a little girl the last time he saw her—knocked on the screen door, a bottle of Jack Daniels in the crook of her arm. They sat and talked on the couch in the basement where he was staying: drinking, kissing, “grabbing ass” and eventually “getting to it.”

This announcement brought Ian to attention as he clapped his hands together with a “Boo-yah muthafuca—boo-fucin’-yah” as he looked around at the other bruthas gathered about [none of whom I can recall by name, except for Monando Cay, the big West Indian.], as if to say, “This is how black dudes and real white boys come home, they take a woman!”

Paul then began describing how the girl went down on him and then climbed on his face and “rode” him, to which Monando smacked his lips in disgust and Ian quipped [this was back in the day when most black dudes would not eat pussy], “Sheeeeit, if she were white I’d eat that pussy too. A man don’ eat pussy on Shit River, but a fine, young white bitch!”

Paul then got serious, explained how he had passed out drunk while she was rocking on his face and how he awoke in a panic, unable to see! He had been afraid that he was blind from the whiskey and panicked, crawling, feeling his way to the bathroom where he could turn on the light.

After flicking on the light, he was still unable to see and discovered that it was because his eyelids would not open.

[At this point, people stopped eating and Ian stopped cheering about what rambling men do to the bitch next door when they roll back into town.]

Paul then said [and I can recall these words], “My eyes were crusted shut, so I turned on the water and washed my face until I could see and it was a mess of blood, the sink filled with her period that had dried on my face.”

A groan went up from the produce prep area where we were taking our lunch as a man threw his half eaten sandwich in the trash and Ian spit up a mouthful of food into the same can and said, after he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, “Sheeeeit, I would a kilt dat bitch!”

Paul, a man with a temper, agreed and said it was his intention to slap her around when he knocked on her door. But that she apologized by way of a blow job and they called it even. The lunch area cleared with the shaking of heads, and I, a young man, barely 20, had been assured in gory detail by my lowlife, occupational elders, that a pedestal was no place for a woman.